Rena Butler - Office Hours.pdf

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Office Hours | Rena Butler
2
February
N ICK R USSO stared at the huge stack of papers, willing
them to burst into flames from the force of his hatred.
No such luck.
A thousand words double-spaced meant about four
pages each. Five classes, twenty-seven students per class.
Sure, there were bound to be a few slackers who didn’t
bother to turn anything in, but that still left Nick with 540
pages, give or take, to read, evaluate, and comment sensibly
upon in just under a week. Plus lesson plans and
presentations to polish up….
Nick sighed. If he started now, maybe he could salvage
some small part of the weekend for himselfsay, 10:00 to
11:00 p.m. on Sunday. He grabbed the paper on the top of
the stack and glanced at the name on it.
No way. I start with that one and I’ll want to throw
myself out the window before lunch. If my office had a
window.
Stuffing that particular masterpiece at the bottom of the
stack, he picked up the next one. The pages weren’t stapled,
there was a coffee stain (he hoped it was coffee) in the
corner, and the whole paper looked to have been yanked out
of the bottom of a backpack and hastily flattened.
Nope .
Office Hours | Rena Butler
3
Nick went to stick that one at the bottom of the pile
when a ballpoint pen smacked him in the side of the head.
He turned to glare at the grinning man in the doorway.
“What the hell , Joe?”
“Just thought I’d stop by to bother you for a bit.”
Joe Heinz had somehow managed to snag an assistant
professorship in the English department, a glorious tenure-
track position that Nick, Kyra, Ryan, and the other adjuncts
might literally kill for. It meant Joe got to teach upper-level
courses, non-required courses, courses that students
actually chose to take and were not forced upon anybody by
the administration. This same administration set the
syllabus and assigned readings for all the freshman
composition courses, and Nick was forever trying to get his
students to see that they were all getting screwed by The
Man.
Nick couldn’t really hate him too much, as Joe had done
his time as an adjunct and earned the professorship based
on the fact that his students not only learned from him, but
actually liked him. However, Nick also couldn’t help but
wonder how many of those ridiculously positive teacher evals
came from the myriad of young femaleand, hell, male
students who fought for the space in Joe’s classes. Really,
Nick heard the gossip.
“Did you have anything helpful to say, like maybe ‘Why
don’t I help you out by grading a few… dozen of those’?” Nick
ventured, hopefully.
“No time. I was going to tell youI got a date tonight.”
“Then go away. I’ve got work to do.”
Office Hours | Rena Butler
4
Joe just grinned evilly. “Have fun with that,” he quipped
as he strolled away.
Nick sighed againhe seemed to be doing that a lot
latelyand glanced around at the drab gray walls of the
office he shared with three other adjuncts. He and his
colleagues had tried to make it bearable. There were various
concert posters tacked to the wall, as well as a whiteboard
that usually boasted Stupid Things Students Have Said This
Week (“What do you mean Wikipedia’s not a scholarly
source?”) and was hastily erased when any stray students
actually wandered in for office hours. Which was not often.
Which was why Nick had the next two hourswell, hour
and fifty minutesto spend quality time with the first round
of his students’ attempts at argument papers. Every
semester brought new and different surprises as to the true
depth of ignorance of today’s college freshman. Gathering his
courage, Nick stretched his arms out wide before running a
hand through his thick, dark hair. He fanned the stack of
papers out on his desk, snatched one from the middle of the
pile, and began to read.
The intro wasn’t half-bad, the thesis statement
contending that Fight Club was actually a repudiation of
classical Marxism rather than a glorification of it. Nick’s
eyebrows shot up, but he recognized a desire he hadn’t felt
in a long timehe actually wanted to keep reading. Nick
checked the name at the top of the paper.
Sean Kendrick.
Not possible . The tool who sat in the back corner of his
classroom and fell asleep almost every day? Nick might not
have even remembered his name if it weren’t for those
Office Hours | Rena Butler
5
obscenely blue eyes that had flashed up at him when he’d
handed out the syllabus the first week. There was no way
Rip Van Winkle back there could’ve spontaneously come up
with something like this. He hadn’t even turned in the MLA
citation homework. This Kendrick kid probably raided his
frat’s file of old papers and put his name at the top. No way
someone like that
Nick stopped that train of thought. He was getting
ahead of himself. Just because he’d managed to become
extraordinarily cynical during his admittedly brief teaching
career didn’t mean it was right to start judging this kid
based on appearances. Nick leafed through his files and
pulled out the detailed class roster.
Kendrick, Sean Morgan. English major. Senior .
Every adviser with a brain told their students to take
Comp I as a freshmansince most of those students came to
college unprepared to write at a college levelbut it wasn’t
unheard of for someone to let the requirement slide until the
last minute. So it was eminently possible Kendrick had the
brain to write the paper.
No reason not to mess with him a little bit first.
“M R . K ENDRICK , do you have a minute?”
“Yup.”
The informality rankled a little, though Nick had to
remind himself that they really weren’t that far apart in age
since the guy was a senior and Nick was not long out of grad

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